Science

“Like Finding a Diamond”: 16-Million-Year-Old Fossil of Elusive Ant Stuns Scientists  SciTechDaily Source link

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Out there in the Universe, a great existential question remains unanswered: are we alone in the Universe? Despite all that we’ve learned — about matter, about the Universe, about all the other stars and planets out …

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In the middle of Chile’s Atacama desert, there’s lots of activity as construction on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is still underway, with cranes helping to move pieces in place. What is it? The ELT is the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) $1.4 billion project to create the next-generation observatory. Here, the world’s largest optical telescope will scan the sky with …

Since conventional explanations have failed to pony up dark matter, one physicist is looking towards the unconventional. In a series of two papers, physicist Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz has proposed two strange, but not impossible, origins for the mystery material responsible for the excess gravitational effects we see out there in the Universe. In the …

The biggest and best of the summer’s string of meteor showers is now underway. The Perseids – known for bringing bright fireballs that arc across the sky – started in mid-July. The meteor shower is expected to be more visible as it continues to ramp up toward its peak, which will be Aug. 12 and Aug. 13. These “shooting stars” …

This week, the Sturgeon Moon rises, giving moongazers across the world the chance to see a beautiful full Moon skimming the horizon. The Sturgeon Moon is the August full Moon, the eighth full Moon of the year, and rises on 9 August at 21:13 BST. What’s more, the Sturgeon Moon marks the beginning of a lunar meeting with the Solar …

A vast blob of hot rock moving slowly beneath the Appalachian Mountains in the northeastern US is now thought to be the result of a divorce between Greenland and Canada some 80 million years ago. A study by an international team of researchers challenges the existing consensus in both geographical and chronological terms. It was previously thought the breaking up …

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Tintina fault is thought to have been inactive for more than 40 million years, but new research suggests that earthquakes occurred in the zone much more recently. Researchers from the University of Victoria identified fault scarps that suggest major slips occurred during the Quaternary period (2.6 million years ago to …

For years, it has been one of the biggest mysteries in marine biology: What is killing the starfish? Since 2013, billions of sea stars, an elegant ocean species commonly known as starfish that are a key part of the environment along the coast of California and other states, have been dying. The animals have suffered from a disease that causes …